A massive federal climate change report that was due next month is out today. It warns of devastating health and economic costs to the US.

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It could be that I am just on a grumpy jag. It is Christmas season and I am alone in a new town dealing with some old baggage.  But, I am not alone in noticing that the government’s own climate report was released just before Black Friday, during the manic rush to buy. During the resulting media coverage of the shopping brawls, the message in the report was mostly lost.

Al Gore:

We don’t really want to see the truth anyway. We have lived with blinders on for decades. Our national mantra has become, “Just give us our stuff and let us live in luxury compared to the rest of the world and we will look the other way.”

American consumerism is a social pattern that rose during the last century. At that time, we had a “war economy”, which pulled the US out of the depression. To rise out of the war economy, Americans were encouraged to participate in a new, consumer-based economy. Accroding to NPR, “In fact, the American consumer was praised as a patriotic citizen in the 1950s, contributing to the ultimate success of the American way of life. “The good purchaser devoted to ‘more, newer and better’ was the good citizen,” historian Lizabeth Cohen explained, “since economic recovery after a decade and a half of depression and war depended on a dynamic mass consumption economy.” You can find more information on the rise of consumerism here.

It was patriotic to be a good consumer! As Americans passed those values on to their children, what no one understood was the toll consumerism would take on our planet. We started to gobble up the world’s resources and helped develop the massive production and transportation machines that create and then move all the stuff around. We found it easier to keep blinders on than to see how consumerism fuels climate change.

Then, we spread our consumer disease around the globe, like Columbus and his men spread smallpox and influenza among the native populations. Then, we started killing off animals thanks to the invasion of plastics into the environment and the rise of global temperatures. Examples: this whale; another whale whose body cavity was filled with plastic wastes; sea turtles who just froze to death off the East Coast.

In the meantime, we thought we were happy because of all our stuff; however, reports show the “paradox of rising consumption and pervasive dissatisfaction” That’s right: the more stuff we get, the less happy we are.

It has been nearly 100 years since the rise of Consumerism. We should know better. Plenty of reports, including the buried new government report, have made the future clear. Climate change will continue to cause major health and economic problems. People will die. Maybe people will die out. But, since we live to shop and because it feels so good, we keep those blinders up. We won’t change. Until we have to. By then it will be too late.

So what are our choices?

Continue to live in denial and let the greedy business owners deplete every last resource. Electing presidents who are part of this machine helps prolong this option.

Consume, consume, consume, knowing it is not really making us all that happy.

Stop consuming. Stop destroying. Stop gobbling resources. First up, stop carbon emissions.  Elect officials who understand the magnitude of the problem and who care about people before corporations and who understand that consumerism is no longer patriotic.

Wait, first up: take off the blinders. Nothing will happen while we are fighting in the aisles for a low-priced television. Then, we each need to make huge changes in our consumption and transportation patterns. And we need to pass it on. It is the babies being born right now who will pay the biggest price in the end.